KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In the days before and after the last holiday weekend, Kansas City area pediatrician Dr. Natasha Burgert said the phone kept ringing.
“We are definitely getting so many more phone calls in the office about kids being exposed, kids getting symptoms, parents being exposed, being at different parties or events where people are now positive,” she said. “There are certainly a lot of healthy, infected people in our community right now.”
So when should a family quarantine? The CDC now says it should happen if you were within six feet of someone with COVID-19 for at least 15 minutes.
“This can all change at a moment’s notice, but right now we’re considering an exposure three days prior – two to three days prior to symptom onset or the day you were tested. So if you are positive, if you become positive, then it's kind of that 48 to 72-hour window prior. Then we are going to start looking for contacts to you if you’re positive or your child, if they’re positive. So it’s either symptom onset or the day that you got tested and we’re positive," Burgert explained.
She still urges families to call the doctor and ask because what a family needs to do can easily become complex.
“Here is the sticky part. If you have a child that you are directly taking care of and they are positive, then that particular individual could be spreading that illness to you for 14 days, right? So that individual that’s positive or that child that’s positive should be quarantined for 10 days or three days fever-free, whichever is longer, so it’s gonna be a minimum of 10 days, possibly 14," Burgert explained.
It gets even more complicated.
“That being said, a parent could be infected during any of those ten days so the rest of the family’s quarantine starts on day number eleven for another fourteen days. So you’re talking about weeks of first caring for a child and then quarantining the family, meaning you’ve got to stay home. You’ve got to have groceries delivered. You’re not going anywhere. You’re not going to activities and all these kinds of things too, because whenever that last exposure is to that person who is infected, your quarantine then begins the next day for the next 10 to 14 days," Burgert said.
That could be a stressful fact for many parents.
“That’s a long time and that’s going to make it exceedingly difficult to keep kids home, for example, depending on the school situation in the fall, exceedingly difficult if there is a home exposure to keep children at home for essentially 29 days," Burgert added.
Burgert talked about different quarantine scenarios for different family situations and believes people should read the CDC recommendations for quarantine that include calendars of how long your family members should be isolated or quarantined.
“What does the rest of the family do if a teenager is positive or there's been a young child at the daycare that is now positive? And that's going to very much depend on how that person in your home can be cared for," she explained.
There is no cut and dry solution that can apply to every family.
“These are the types of things we have to navigate on a very individual basis for every family,” Burgert said. “If it’s a parent, can the rest of the family isolate so that can decrease their quarantine time? Do they need to get tested before they can go back to work?”
It gets even trickier in multi-generational households or households with health concerns.
“It escalates in complexity when you might be living with a grandparent or living with someone who has asthma or is pregnant,” Burgert said. “That adds a layer of complexity here. That’s very, very hard to navigate without some expert guidance.”
The best guidance she could offer was to talk to the family doctor to know how long to quarantine.
“Leaning into your doctor, your pediatrician, your internist, is going to be exceptionally critical so that we can limit the exposure to the rest of our community and try to really crush the spread that we’re seeing here in Kansas City," Burgert said.
She believes parents need to have a better understanding of what quarantine means and the reality of how long and hard it could be.
“We had calls this weekend of parents who knew they... needed to be in self-quarantine, for example, but were calling us from the grocery store," Burgert shared.
She said she is also concerned about the number of healthy, infected people in our community who may never be tested.
That, and the reality of lengthy quarantines that could be difficult for families to follow with demands of work and school, is the reason she believes families need to heed guidelines to keep their families safe and avoid possible exposures. Instead, she is worried we could be letting our guard down.
“So, for better sake of valor. That's why we wear a mask, we're trying to protect each other from it because right now the question is, could this be COVID? The answer is always going to be yes," Burgert said.
